Daily Log 8 June 2011 - Compassion for self is the greatest gift you can give to yourself

DAILY LOG 8 JUNE 2011 MUSINGS AND THOUGHTS Compassion was not something I associated myself with. Once upon a long time ago I was a very different person. At the core I was a deeply angry person and whenever I failed at something or when I encounter stress I used to beat myself up, quite literary. I used to bang my head against the wall and if there wasn't a wall available I would use my fist. It was as the more I hurt myself, the better I felt. The odd thing was that nobody knew I was doing it. I hid the shame of it so well that even my closest friends didn't know what was going on with me, much less what I was doing to myself. We are never thought to love ourselves. It was as if the very idea of self love came from vanity and was frowned upon. Yet that very idea hits us at the core. We should love ourselves more. We should love ourselves so much that the idea of not doing what we want to do (or living the life that we want to live or even chasing the dream we want to pursue) is alien and unthinkable.So instead of self love, there was self hatred. The source of my anger and hate is too unbearable even now to think about. Sometimes, the memories past is so unyielding and so intense that it comes to rule not only the present but also the future. What I've learnt is that the past has nothing to do with the future. We can make our own future. We can create our own destiny. Everyday we should start with a clean slate where failures and disappointments are defined as valuable learning experiences. Maybe that is what we should teach our children. Maybe that is what we should continue to teach ourselves. As for me, I never thought I would be doing what I'm doing right now in terms of not only the triathlon (which though it seems to take a majority of my life, it doesn't) but also in terms of work and career.

If I allowed the past to rule my present or my future, God only knows where I would be right now. Back to the matters at present, the triathlon training. I haven't been very active the last one week because of the flu and cough and I can feel myself getting very uneasy about not working out with the intensity I am used to. So today I wanted to have quite an intense workout so I both cycled and ran this afternoon and evening.

BIKE I had a bike workout this afternoon as I wanted to really push myself today. I'm still not happy with the state of my pedaling and will focus more on technique in the coming few weeks. I feel cycling is the triathlon discipline where I have the least knowledge in terms of technique so I must do more reading and more research.

RUN This evenings run was very intense:

10 min warm up
8 min moderate (70-80% MHR)
20 min hard (80-90% MHR)
8 minute recovery
10 min cool down

I was averaging about 2:45 per lap at my home park which is slower than the kind of speed I was generating 2 weeks ago at the same effort. I attribute that to the cough and flu that I'm suffering from. Still, I thought I did pretty well as I was running quite well and quite consistently during the 20 min hard run. The only question is whether I can get it down to 2:30 per lap for the full distance. I have 6 weeks to do that so let's see what happens....